The Book Stops Here

Jimmy Wales wanted to build a free encyclopedia on the Internet. So he raised an army of amateurs and created the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive library of the future called Wikipedia.

Late last year, Wales and Angela Beesley, an astonishingly dedicated Wikipedian, launched a for-profit venture called Wiki­Cities. The company will provide free hosting for "community-based" sites - RVers, poodle owners, genealogy buffs, and so on. The sites will operate on the same software that powers Wikipedia, and the content will be available under a free license. But WikiCities intends to make money by selling adver­tising. After all, if several thousand people can create an encyclopedia, a few hundred Usher devotees should be able to put together the ultimate fan site. And if legions of Usher fans are hanging out in one place, some advertiser will pay to try to sell them concert tickets or music downloads.

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It may feel like we've been down this road before - remember GeoCities and theglobe.com? But Wales says this is different because those earlier sites lacked any mechanism for true community. "It was just free home­pages," he says. WikiCities, he believes, will let people who share a passion also share a project. They'll be able to design and build projects together. So the founder of the Web's grand experiment in the democratic dissemination of information is also trying to resurrect GeoCities. While some may find the notion silly, many others just want a piece of Jimbo magic.

During our conversation over lunch, Wales' cell phone rings. It's a partner at Accel, the venture capital firm, calling to talk about WikiCities and any other Wiki-related investment ideas Wales might have. Wales says he's busy and asks the caller to phone back later. Then he smiles at me. "I'll let him cool his heels awhile."

Wikipedia's articles on the British peerage system - clearheaded explanations of dukes, viscounts, and other titles of nobility - are largely the work of a user known as Lord Emsworth. A few of Emsworth's pieces on kings and queens of England have been honored as Wikipedia's Featured Article of the Day. It turns out that Lord Emsworth claims to be a 16-year-old living in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody has to know you're a sophomore.

And that has some distressed. Larry Sanger gave voice to these criticisms in a recent essay posted on kuro5hin.org titled "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism." Although he acknowledges that "Wikipedia is very cool," he argues that the site's production model suffers from two big problems.

The first is that "regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia," librarians, teachers, and academics don't perceive it as credible, because it has no formal review process. The second problem, according to Sanger, is that the site in general and Wales in particular are too "anti-elitist." Established scholars might be willing to contribute to Wikipedia - but not if they have to deal with trolls and especially not if they're considered no different from any schmo with an iMac.

Speaking from his home in Columbus, Ohio, where he teaches at Ohio State, Sanger stresses that Wikipedia is a fine and worthy endeavor. But he says that academics don't take it seriously. "A lot of the articles look like they're written by undergraduates." He believes that "people who make knowing things their life's work should be accorded a special place in the project." But since Wikipedia's resolute anti-elitism makes that unlikely, Sanger argues, something else will happen: Wikipedia will fork - that is, a group of academics will take Wikipedia's content, which is available under a free license, and produce their own peer-reviewed reference work. "I wanted to send a wake-up call to the Wikipedia community to tell them that this fork is probably going to happen."

Wales' response essentially boils down to this: Fork you. "You want to organize that?" he sniffs. "Here are the servers." Yet Wales acknowledges that in the next year, partly in response to these concerns, Wikipedia will likely offer a stable - that is, unchangeable - version alongside its One for All edition.

But both Sanger's critique and Wales' reaction miss a larger point: You can't evaluate Wikipedia by traditional encyclopedia standards. A forked Wikipedia run by academics would be Nupedia 2.0. It would use the One Best Way production model, which inevitably would produce a One Best Way product. That's not a better or worse Wikipedia any more than Instapundit.com is a better or worse Washington Post. They are different animals.

Encyclopedias aspire to be infallible. But Wikipedia requires that the perfect never be the enemy of the good. Citizen editors don't need to make an entry flawless. They just need to make it better. As a result, even many Wikipedians believe the site is not as good as traditional encyclopedias. "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Wikipedia a 7.8 in reliability," Kvaran told me in New Mexico. "I'd give Britannica an 8.8." But how much does that matter? Britannica has been around since before the American Revolution; Wikipedia just celebrated its fifth birthday. More important, Britannica costs $70 a year; Wikipedia is free. The better criterion on which to measure Wikipedia is whether this very young, pretty good, ever improving, totally free site serves a need - just as the way to measure Britannica is whether the additional surety that comes from its production model is worth the cost.

There's another equally important difference between the two offerings. The One Best Way approach creates something finished. The One for All model creates something alive. When the Indian Ocean tsunami erupted late last year, Wikipedians produced several entries on the topic within hours. By contrast, World Book, whose CD-ROM allows owners to download regular updates, hadn't updated its tsunami or Indian Ocean entries a full month after the devastation occurred. That's the likely fate of Wikipedia's proposed stable, or snapshot, version. Fixing its contents in a book or on a CD or DVD is tantamount to embalming a living thing. The body may look great, but it's no longer breathing.

"You can create life in there," says Wiki­pedian Oliver Brown, a high school teacher in Aptos, California. "If you don't know about something, you can start an article, and other people can come and feed it, nurture it." For example, two years ago, Danny Wool was curious about the American architectural sculptor Lee Lawrie, whose statue of Atlas sits nearby Rockefeller Center. Wool posted a stub - a few sentences on a topic - in the hopes that someone would add to it. That someone turned out to be Kvaran, who owned several books on Lawrie and who'd photographed his work not only at Rockefeller Center but also at the Capitol Building in Lincoln, Nebraska. Today, the Lawrie entry has grown from two sentences to several thorough paragraphs, a dozen photos, and a list of references. Brown himself posted a stub when he was wondering how many people were considered the father or mother of something. Today Wiki­pedia lists more than 230 people known as the father or mother of an idea, a movement, or an invention. And that number will likely be higher tomorrow. As the father of this new kind of encyclopedia puts it, "Wikipedia will never be finished."

In 1962, Charles Van Doren - who would go on to become a senior editor of Britannica but is more famous for his role in the 1950s quiz show scandal - wrote a think piece for the journal The American Behavioral Scientist. His essay, "The Idea of an Encyclopedia," is similar in spirit to the one Sanger wrote late last year: a warning to his community.

Van Doren warned not that encyclopedias of his day lacked credibility, but that they lacked vitality. "The tone of American encyclopedias is often fiercely inhuman," he wrote. "It appears to be the wish of some contributors to write about living institutions as if they were pickled frogs, outstretched upon a dissecting board." An encyclopedia ought to be a "revolutionary document," he argued. And while Van Doren didn't call for a new production model, he did say that "the ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe."

What stood in the way of this new approach was precisely what encyclopedias prided themselves on. "Respectability seems safe," he wrote. "But what will be respectable in 30 years seems avant-garde now. If an encyclopedia hopes to be respectable in 2000, it must appear daring in the year 1963."

Jimbo and his minions - from Einar Kvaran in his New Mexico trailer to Lord Emsworth in his New Jersey bedroom - may seem daring today. But they're about to become respectable.

Contributing editor Daniel H. Pink (dhpink@mac.com) is author of A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.